In his Arcades Project... «Heroines»
robot6 ноября 2015In his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin seizes on Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” for his chapter on flânerie. In the story the narrator follows a flâneur down the streets of London and (as a voyeur) observes the man’s erotic compulsion towards the crowd, this ecstasy of being lost in the crowd. Yet the flâneur by his essence is male — the woman in the city is still viewed as both commodity and consumer. What is the flâneuse escaping? She is escaping her role as the object of desire. She wants instead to gaze, to desire.
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